Just around the corner from Picasso’s etchings of muscular minotaurs hovering over vulnerable sleeping nude women in the Brooklyn Museum, Nina Chanel Abney’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ features very different hybrid characters – some with tenacles coming from their heads, others with horns or hair. Enjoying a moment of communal relaxation, Abney’s characters adopt a picnicking pose familiar from Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe amongst other iconic artworks, while engaging a different kind of forbidden fruit – a selection of luscious watermelons, made sensitive because of their racist associations. Both Abney and Picasso’s work feature in ‘It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,’ a group exhibition which rethinks Picasso’s oeuvre via art by twenty and twenty-first century women artists whose work disrupts traditionally masculine modernism. (On view through Sept 24th).
